RiGonz: 2011

Unas lecturas paralelas se han cruzado por un momento: la racionalización de las relaciones entre las personas entre una bedder y sus alumnos, según lo cuenta Judt en su El refugio de la memoria, y la idea de historia de Tolstoi en El erizo y la zorra de Berlin. Completa este par, y lo cierra en parte, una imagen de una simulación por ordenador, muy simple, del vuelo en bandada junto con la más conocida referencia al bagel man de Levitt.

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[El refugio de la memoria, Tony Judt]

Una vez, a finales de los setenta, ejercí esa competencia [la de decano adjunto en King’s College] al mediar entre un puñado de estudiantes (chicos y chicas, ya que King’s era mixto desde 1972) a los que una mañana temprano se había visto retozando desnudos por los prados del college y una bedder que se había sentido ofendida por semejante falta de decoro. Los estudiantes estaban completamente desconcertados: en aquellos tiempos postautoritarios les resultaba incomprensible que nadie encontrara perjudicial tal comportamiento, y mucho menos ‘inadecuado’. No se trataba, como me señaló uno de ellos, de que ‘lo hubieran hecho en la calle’, en una referencia a Paul McCartney que razonablemente podían esperar que reconociera un colega-de-los-sesenta como yo.

La bedder, sin embargo, era inconsolable. Y no porque no estuviera familiarizada con la desnudez. Había sido testigo de generaciones de jóvenes jugadores de rugby retozando medio borrachos en paños menores antes de desplomarse presas del sopor etílico. Pero esto era diferente. Para empezar, habían participado chicas y eso la había ofendido. En segundo lugar nadie había hecho el menor esfuerzo por fingir, disimular o taparse. Y, en tercer lugar, se habían reído ante su desagrado. En pocas palabras, habían infringido las reglas de su compromiso y se sentía humillada.

Resultó que los estudiantes en cuestión procedían en su mayoría de escuelas públicas: estudiantes de origen modesto procedentes a una primera generación socialmente ascendente. También eso ofendía a la bedder. Una cosa era ser tratada con condescendencia por jóvenes caballeros al estilo antiguo, que normalmente se hubieran disculpado al día siguiente y expresado su remordimiento mediante un regalo, o incluso con un cariñoso y sentido abrazo. Pero este nuevo tipo de estudiantes la trataba como a una igual, y era esto, más que cualquier otra cosa, lo que hería sus sentimientos. La bedder no era una igual de los alumnos: nunca lo sería. Pero al menos ella tenía un derecho tradicional, al menos durante los años en que ellos eran estudiantes, a su contención y a su respeto. ¿Qué sentido tenía ser una sirvienta mal pagada si eso dejaba de ser así? En tal caso la relación quedaba reducida a la de un simple empleo, y llegados a este punto mejor le iría en la fábrica de conservas local.

Los matices de este encuentro se me hubieran escapado totalmente de no haberme educado a mí mismo en el principio de “nobleza obliga”. Traté de explicarles a los estudiantes – que eran diez años más jóvenes que yo- exactamente por qué aquella señora de mediana edad estaba tan ofendida y disgustada. Pero todo lo que pude oír fue la justificación de una servidumbre obligada por contrato en una época de igualitarismo teórico. Desde luego no estaban contra la institución de las bedders, de la que eran beneficiarios. Simplemente pensaban que aquellas mujeres tenían que estar mejor pagadas: como si eso fuera a inmunizarlas contra las ofensas clasistas y las llevara a dispensar a los chicos y chicas, cuyas camas hacían, de sus obligaciones (por condescendientes que fueran) de ser educados y considerados con ellas.

Los estudiantes reflejaban fielmente actitudes de su tiempo. Lo mismo que los economista de hoy – y a pesar de que afirmen con todo cariño sus preferencias radicales-, ellos eran de la opinión de que más vale reducir todas las relaciones humanas a cálculos racionales del interés personal. ¿Seguro que la bedder hubiera preferido ganar el doble y aceptar hacer la vista gorda ante un comportamiento que encontraba ofensivo?

Sin embargo, tal como lo recuerdo, era la bedder la que mostraba haber captado con más sutileza las verdades esenciales del intercambio humano. Los estudiantes, desconocedores de sí mismos, repetían como loros una visión capitalista reducida y empobrecida: un ideal de unidades productivas, a modo de mónadas, que maximicen el provecho privado, pero indiferentes a la comunidad o a la convivencia. Su bedder veía el asunto de modo distinto. Ella podría ser medio analfabeta y escasamente educada, pero sus instintos la guiaban sin error a la comprensión de la relación humana, a las reglas no escitas que la sostienen y al apriorismo de la ética interpersonal en la que descansa. Sin duda alguna ella no había oído hablar nunca de Adam Smith, pero el autor de la Teoría de los sentimientos morales seguramente la habría aplaudido.

[El erizo y la zorra, Isaiah Berlin]
Esa es, pues, la desmedida ilusión que Tolstoi se propone denunciar: que, con sus propios recursos, los individuos son capaces de entender y controlar el curso de los acontecimientos. Creerlo así es convertirse en víctima de un tremendo error. Junto con esos rostros públicos – esas gentes huecas, a medias auto-engañadas, a medias conscientes de su superchería, gentes que hablan compulsivamente sin ton ni son sólo para cubrir las apariencias y evitar enfrentarse con las verdades desnudas-, junto con esa complicada maquinaria que oculta el espectáculo de su impotencia, de su prescindibilidad, de su ceguera, yace el mundo real, el curso de la vida que los hombres entienden, la dedicación a los detalles habituales de la existencia cotidiana. Cuando Tolstoi compara la vida real – la experiencia “viviente”, individual, concreta, diaria- con la visión panorámica conjurada por los historiadores, advierte con absoluta claridad cuál de las dos cosas es real y coherente, y cuál un pergeño, a veces ideado con elegante ingenio pero siempre ficticio. Aunque no se parece a Virginia Woolf en esto – como casi en nada- Tolstoi fue quizás el primero en expresar la célebre acusación que medio siglo después lanzaría la escritora contra los profetas de su generación – Shaw, Wells y Arnold Bennet-, materialistas ciegos que nunca comprendieron qué es lo que constituye la esencia de la vida, confundiendo los accidentes externos, los aspectos banales ajenos al alma humana – las llamadas realidades sociales, económicas y políticas- con lo que por sí solo es genuino: experiencia individual, relación específica entre personas, colores, olores, sabores, sonidos y movimientos, celos, amores, odios, pasiones, chispazos intuitivos, momentos de transformación, sucesión común y cotidiana de datos privados, que son lo que constituye cuanto existe, es decir, la realidad.

[The Computational Beauty of Nature, Flake]

[Ay, cómo se nota que el libro es de 1998, ¡poco más de 10 años!]

[Freakonomics, Levitt & Dubner]
So if sumo wrestlers, schoolteachers, and day-care parents all cheat, are we to assume that mankind is innately and universally corrupt? And if so, how corrupt?
The answer may lie in ... bagels. Consider the true story of a man named Paul Feldman.

Once upon a time, Feldman dreamed big dreams. Trained as an agricultural economist, he wanted to tackle world hunger. Instead, he took a job in Washington, analyzing weapons expenditures for the U.S. Navy. This was in 1962. For the next twenty-odd years, he did more of the same. He held senior-level jobs and earned good money, but he wasn't fully engaged in his work. At the office Christmas party, colleagues would introduce him to their wives not as "the head of the public research group" (which he was) but as "the guy who brings in the bagels."
The bagels had begun as a casual gesture: a boss treating his employees whenever they won a research contract. Then he made it a habit. Every Friday, he would bring in some bagels, a serrated knife, and cream cheese. When employees from neighboring floors heard about the bagels, they wanted some too. Eventually he was bringing in fifteen dozen bagels a week. In order to recoup his costs, he set out a cash basket and a sign with the suggested price. His collection rate was about 95 percent; he attributed the underpayment to oversight, not fraud.
In 1984, when his research institute fell under new management, Feldman took a look at his career and grimaced. He decided to quit his job and sell bagels. His economist friends thought he had lost his mind, but his wife supported him. The last of their three children was finishing college, and they had retired their mortgage.
Driving around the office parks that encircle Washington, he solicited customers with a simple pitch: early in the morning, he would deliver some bagels and a cash basket to a company's snack room; he would return before lunch to pick up the money and the leftovers. It was an honor-system commerce scheme, and it worked. Within a few years, Feldman was delivering 8,400 bagels a week to 140 companies and earning as much as he had ever made as a research analyst. He had thrown off the shackles of cubicle life and made himself happy.
He had also- quite without meaning to- designed a beautiful economic experiment. From the beginning, Feldman kept rigorous data on his business. So by measuring the money collected against the bagels taken, he found it possible to tell, down to the penny,) just how honest his customers were. Did they steal from him? If so, what were the characteristics of a company that stole versus a company that did not? Under what circumstances did people tend to steal more, or less?
As it happens, Feldman's accidental study provides a window onto a form of cheating that has long stymied academics: white-collar crime. (Yes, shorting the bagel man is white-collar crime, writ however small.) It might seem ludicrous to address as large and intractable a problem as white-collar crime through the life of a bagel man. But often a small and simple question can help chisel away at the biggest problems.

Despite all the attention paid to rogue companies like Enron, academics know very little about the practicalities of white-collar crime. The reason? There are no good data. A key fact of white-collar crime is that we hear about only the very slim fraction of people who are caught cheating. Most embezzlers lead quiet and theoretically happy lives; employees who steal company property are rarely detected.
With street crime, meanwhile, that is not the case. A mugging or a burglary or a murder is usually tallied whether or not the criminal is caught. A street crime has a victim, who typically reports the crime to the police, who generate data, which in turn generate thousands of academic papers by criminologists, sociologists, and economists. But white-collar crime presents no obvious victim. From whom, exactly, did the masters of Enron steal? And how can you measure something if you don't know to whom it happened, or with what frequency, or in what magnitude?
Paul Feldman's bagel business was different. It did present a victim. The victim was Paul Feldman.

When he started his business, he expected a 95 percent payment rate, based on the experience at his own office. But just as crime tends to be low on a street where a police car is parked, the 95 percent rate was artificially high: Feldman's presence had deterred theft. Not only that, but those bagel eaters knew the provider and had feelings (presumably good ones) about him. A broad swath of psychological and economic research has shown that people will pay different amounts for the same item depending on who is providing it. The economist Richard Thaler, in his 1985 "Beer on the Beach" study, showed that a thirsty sunbather would pay $2.65 for a beer delivered from a resort hotel but only $1.50 for the same beer if it came from a shabby grocery store.

In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95 percent. He came to consider a company "honest" if its payment rate was above 90 percent. He considered a rate between 80 and 90 percent "annoying but tolerable." If a company habitually paid below 80 percent, Feldman might post a hectoring note, like this one:

The cost of bagels has gone up dramatically since the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, the number of bagels that disappear without being paid for has also gone up. Don't let that continue. I don't imagine that you would teach your children to cheat, so why do it yourselves?

In the beginning, Feldman left behind an open basket for the cash, but too often the money vanished. Then he tried a coffee can with a money slot in its plastic lid, which also proved too tempting. In the end, he resorted to making small plywood boxes with a slot cut into the top. The wooden box has worked well. Each year he drops off about seven thousand boxes and loses, on average, just one to theft. This is an intriguing statistic: the same people who routinely steal more than 10 percent of his bagels almost never stoop to stealing his money box-a tribute to the nuanced social calculus of theft. From Feldman's perspective, an office worker who eats a bagel without paying is committing a crime; the office worker probably doesn't think so. This distinction probably has less to do with the admittedly small amount of money involved (Feldman's bagels cost one dollar each, cream cheese included) than with the context of the "crime." The same office worker who fails to pay for his bagel might also help himself to a long slurp of soda while filling a glass in a self-serve restaurant, but he is very unlikely to leave the restaurant without paying.
So what do the bagel data have to say? In recent years, there have been two noteworthy trends in the overall payment rate. The first was a long, slow decline that began in 1992. By the summer of 2001, the overall rate had slipped to about 87 percent. But immediately after September 11 of that year, the rate spiked a full 2 percent and hasn't slipped much since. (If a 2 percent gain in payment doesn't sound like much, think of it this way: the nonpayment rate fell from 13 to 11 percent, which amounts to a 15 percent decline in theft.) Because many of Feldman's customers are affiliated with national security, there may have been a patriotic element to this 9/11 Effect. Or it may have represented a more general surge in empathy.
The data also show that smaller offices are more honest than big ones. An office with a few dozen employees generally outpays by 3 to 5 percent an office with a few hundred employees. This may seem counterintuitive. In a bigger office, a bigger crowd is bound to convene around the bagel table, providing more witnesses to make sure you drop your money in the box. But in the big-office/small-office comparison, bagel crime seems to mirror street crime. There is far less street crime per capita in rural areas than in cities, in large part because a rural criminal is more likely to be known (and therefore caught). Also, a smaller community tends to exert greater social incentives against crime, the main one being shame.
The bagel data also reflect how much personal mood seems to affect honesty. Weather, for instance, is a major factor. Unseasonably pleasant weather inspires people to pay at a higher rate. Unseasonably cold weather, meanwhile, makes people cheat prolifically; so do heavy rain and wind. Worst are the holidays. The week of Christmas produces a 2 percent drop in payment rates-again, a 15 percent increase in theft, an effect on the same magnitude, in reverse, as that of 9/11. Thanksgiving is nearly as bad; the week of Valentine's Day is also lousy, as is the week straddling April 15. There are, however, a few good holidays: the weeks that include the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Columbus Day. The difference in the two sets of holidays? The low-cheating holidays represent little more than an extra day off from work. The high-cheating holidays are fraught with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones.
Feldman has also reached some of his own conclusions about honesty, based more on his experience than the data. He has come to believe that morale is a big factor-that an office is more honest when the employees like their boss and their work. He also believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He got this idea after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors-an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and administrative employees. Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn't consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives.)

RiGonz

lunes, 10 de octubre de 2011

Found among Lines 11.10

lunes, 8 de agosto de 2011

Found among Lines 11.08

Found among Lines 11.06

domingo, 31 de julio de 2011

Found among Lines 11.07

sábado, 23 de abril de 2011

La urdimbre de La historia

jueves, 13 de enero de 2011

Sonnet 66